Some highlights from a nice article that I found in my feeds. They are excerpts of the document, text in italic was written by me. Please note that the lines lack some context.
.NET Services
.NET Access Control Service
All communication with the Access Control Service relies on standard protocols such as WS-Trust and WS-Federation. This makes the service accessible from any kind of application on any platform.
Claims-based identity is on its way to becoming the standard approach for distributed environments.
By providing an STS (Securtity Token Service) in the cloud, complete with rules-based claims transformation, the Access Control Service makes this modern approach to identity more attractive.
.NET Service Bus
The Service Bus assigns your organization a URI root, below which you’re free to create any naming hierarchy you like.
This allows your endpoints to be assigned specific, discoverable URIs.
Your application must also open a connection with the Service Bus for each endpoint it exposes.
The Service Bus holds this connection open, which solves two problems.
First, NAT is no longer an issue, since traffic on the open connection with the Service Bus will always be routed to your application. Second, because the connection was initiated from inside the firewall, there’s no problem passing information back to the application—the firewall won’t block this traffic.
.NET Workflow Service
Running (workflows) in the cloud brings some limitations, however.(not all Windows Workflow Foundation activities are available: code activity isn’t).
WF-based applications running in the Workflow Service can only use WF’s sequential workflow model, for example.
Also, running arbitrary code isn’t allowed, and so neither the BAL’s Code activity nor custom activities can be used.
SQL Services
SQL Services is an umbrella name for what will be a group of cloud-based technologies.
(the first one available is SQL Data Services)
SQL Data Services doesn’t provide a standard relational database, nor does it support SQL queries.
LINQ C# syntax, with queries sent via either SOAP or a RESTful approach. The other is to use ADO.NET Data Services
Live Services
A mesh-enabled Web application must be implemented using a multi-platform technology, such as Microsoft Silverlight, DHTML, or Adobe Flash. These technologies are supported on all of the operating systems that can run the Live Framework.(targeting Windows Vista/XP, Macintosh OS X, and Windows Mobile 6).
